Blerg...

Been spending most of the weekend applying for jobs online. Hoping to get something stable soon. Taking a few minutes for a sanity break right now, filling out form after form is mind-numbing and I'm quickly reaching my limit. Unless I hear from someone tonight, I'll probably be back out tomorrow job hunting door-to-door at local companies and such, up until I need to head to class in the evening. I wish there was a better way to go about this.

I've halfway been bouncing around the idea of making up a cd compilation of hacking/security tools and selling it to my classmates for 20 dollars. There's a lot of stuff out there under the GNU, and you're allowed to resell it. And frankly most of my classmates wouldn't know the good tools if they tripped over them, so I would be providing them the service of screening the tools first and maybe writing up some basic instructions about what the tool is and what one uses it for. I could probably make about 200 dollars or so doing that. My hesitation mainly comes from the fact that there's at least one wannabe hacker in the class who I really don't trust to use such tools ethically. But again, if I limit the cd to the tools that are already publicly available, I think that would satisfy my ethical concerns since I wouldn't actually be giving him anything he could not get on his own rather easily. I'm not sure yet, though, still thinking.

Speaking of my school (which has now changed its name to Banner College since being bought from the Chubb Insurance Group), they're moving to a new building just down the street from the old one, and they're apparently getting rid of some old stuff presently. I got a bunch of computer books from them that are somewhat outdated but I think could still be useful to some degree. The Waite Group's New C Primer Plus (Second Edition) is one of the best ones in there, I think, since the programming language I'm working with now (Objective C) on the Mac is a strict superset of C. I also got such classics as:

Publishing from the Desktop by John Seybold and Fritz Dressler
The Waite Group Advanced C Primer ++ by Stephen Prata
Security in the Enterprise by The Chubb Institute/NIIT
Microsoft Windows Server Operating Systems by The Chubb Institute/NIIT
SAMS Teach Yourself Visual C++ 6 in 21 days by David Chapman with Jeff Heaton
Guide to Disaster Recovery by Michael Erbschloe
Computers by Larry and Nancy Long
Peter Norton's Computing Fundamentals (Third Edition)
and (last but certainly not least)
Introduction to the IBM System, by the Computer Science Center of the University of Maryland, Handout #1 CSC IBM Series, Updated July 1993.

Nice little pile of loot there, don'tcha think? Though I have to say, getting it all home through the Metro was a BITCH.

Ok, something for my quote file

"There are 10 types of people in the world, Those who understand binary, and those who dont." -author unknown

This is especially funny to me because I've been learning about binary and hexadecimal in my computer classes. I even took the time to figure out the basis for the IP ranges that make up the different classes of networks is found in binary. For instance:

Class A Networks have IP addresses ranging from 0._._._ through 126._._._
Class B Networks have IP addresses ranging from 128.0._._ through 191.255._._
Class C Networks have IP addresses ranging from 192.0.0._ through 223.255.255._
And so on. Doesn't look like there's a real pattern there, does it? But there is.

Now, in binary:
0 would be written 00000000.
128 would be written 10000000.
192 would be written 11000000.
224 would be written 11100000.
And so on. See the pattern now?

The number ranges aren't arbitrary. They're based on the binary in a very orderly and logical way. They didn't teach us this in class, or in our textbooks, I figured it out on my own, but the fact that I'm the only one in my class to figure this out and the teacher himself didn't even mention it to us (though seemed or pretended to know it already when I mentioned it to him in class the next day) really does underscore that there's a fundamental difference between those who understand binary and those who don't. I don't claim to be great at binary, but I've at least grasped that much of it so far, and it's an amazing tool for helping you figure out what class a network is rather than trying to memorize an awkward series of number ranges in decimal form.

More Geekery

So, I'm tinkering around a bit with the spare computers in the basement, checking to see if any of them have halfway decent NIC cards (other than Shub-Niggurath). They do not, however one does catch my eye. At first glance, it appears to have two modems. I check it further and note that is not the case. It has one modem, and one Dialogic D/42D-SX "Switch Integration Card". Still working on figuring out what exactly that is; I'd think it had something to do with network switches if the ports weren't RJ11, but that could still be the explanation if we're simply dealing with older technology. The modem itself appears to be a US-Robotics Sportster 0461 internal modem, with a line in for a microphone and a line out for a speaker.